Sunday, May 7, 2017

Moral Imagination

Rather than delving into the moral arguments on why you shouldn't steel the candy bar sitting on a coworkers desk, it is mentally more efficient to just view doing so as impossible.

“When people do something immoral, people tend to say things like, ‘No, that can’t be right,’ or ‘I can’t believe it,’” Phillips said. “There’s a sense that the brain treats these kind of things similarly to how it would react if someone told you it is possible to turn your hat into a candy bar, or something equally impossible.”

The authors conclude this is a good thing:

“We think this might actually help people act morally in the real world,” he said. “Maybe it’s easier to do the right thing if your brain is designed to treat the wrong thing … as if it were impossible. Because if you admitted something was possible, it might start to feel pretty tempting.”

But I do wonder if this same mental construct also makes it more difficult to believe that people who actually have committed immoral acts really did so.